samfromhernando;1577668Can you explain in as few words as possible how to "boot up from the bootable clone of my drive"? AND did you create this "Clone"??? or maybe direct me to a website which explains the operation. IHave a Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks
Thanks for the help[/QUOTE said:
Sure thing.
So I have a Mac (any model) and an external drive (any model, as long as it has a capacity equal to or greater than the "boot drive" (the one inside the computer). In my case the two are connected by FireWire but USB and other ways work fine.
1. I use a program called "Carbon Copy Cloner" ($40) -- some people prefer "SuperDuper" ($30) -- and tell it to make a bootable clone of my internal hard drive to the blank external drive (target-to-destination).
2. Once it has done that, I can restart the computer and hold down the Option key (in Windows-speak, the Alt key) and keep holding it until I see options for which drive I'd like to boot from: the original drive or the clone I just made on the external drive. In this case, I would choose the external drive.
3. This will usually take a little longer than booting up from the internal drive, but once it's done I can then open Disk Utility and erase the internal drive. I like to give it a "secure" pass of filling the drive with zeros, which takes longer, but means the entire disk has really been erased rather than just the directory.
4. So that's done, and I'm still using the external drive as my boot drive, I fire up Carbon Copy Cloner (since its on the external too) and repeat the clone operation, only this time going from the external to the (now blank) internal drive.
5. When done, I'm back to where I was when I started. I just restart the machine, hold the option key down, pick my internal drive as the boot drive, and I'm back in business.
This whole process takes a few hours, but you don't have to watch it -- just stop back by periodically to move to the next step. If you keep a bootable clone handy as I do, then you can skip step one. For my 500GB of data, this operation typically takes a couple of hours on Firewire 400 and three hours on USB2.